Lots of people worry about AI and the effect it is going to have on the economy and wider issues of society. Blaise Agüera y Arcas of Google AI has made a short film explaining how AI might just cause a transition from a fact-based world to something much less certain. You can no longer believe your eyes.

We can speculate on what effects AI will have in the near future, and some people might want to talk about AI being over-hyped and over-sold, but the advances have been huge. We still don't have all the answers and yes it is possible to over-claim, but there are some areas where we are progressing rapidly enough for the effects to start to be seen.

In his video, Blaise Agüera y Arcas starts out looking at the idea of a Generative Adversarial Network GAN - a generalization of the old actor-critic approach. One neural network generates examples and another network tries to tell the fake from the real. Here you have the problem in a nutshell - if the GAN is successfully trained, the fake and the real merge.

None of these things or places exist (DeepMind).

Watch the first part of the video to see how it works and to see some examples. However, don't give up until you have seen it to the end because this is where the prospect of AI fakes becoming so good and so cheap that you really will not be able to believe what you see:

Notice the subtlety at the end of the video. It isn't just that you might see photos, videos and have a live interaction with deep fakes that seem real; it is that the availability of cheap quick deep fakes will enable people to deny that real experiences are actually real.

If you want to discredit any accusation simply play the fake card.

Sometimes to appreciate how clever this all is you need to see the sort of mistake that an undertrained network can produce.

To find out more about GANs used in natural image synthesis read the recent paper from Google listed below.